Maru Landscapes Website      Galleries      About      News      Prints      Contact      Slideshow     

Welcome to the Maru Landscapes Blog. Here, I will share with you my latest images, techniques, and thoughts on landscape photography. From the best places to go, to the best equipment and techniques to use, you will find it here. I hope you enjoy the blog and come to visit often.

Jeremy Jackson

Winter in the Rockies

Story: This is an image of Abraham Lake in Alberta. The lake freezes over early and develops fantastically interesting ice formations. I spent a day walking over the vast expanse of ice and found this composition just as I was beggining to give up for the night. My plan was to wake very early the next morning, walk on to the ice in the dark and see what images I could make of this strange ice formation.

There is always some luck in landscape photography and this image was no exception. I had no idea that the sun would rise over the mountains in the distance and so did not plan for the beautiful yellow and orange glow on the low horizon or the under lighting on the clouds.

I set up my 14-24mm lens about 2 feet from the ice and roughly 6 feet from the diamond shaped crack in the mid ground. Since I had broken my cable release earlier in the trip, the longest exposure I could use was 30 seconds. In the 7 am dark, lit only by a half moon, 30 seconds was not long enough to expose the ice at ISO 400 and f8 (my preferred settings for this kind of shot). This forced me to shoot the foreground at f4 instead of f8 and so required focus stacking to achieve sharpness throughout the image. After making 4 focus stacked exposures for the ice at 30 seconds, ISO 400 and f4, I turned my attention to the sky and mountains in the distance. This required only one exposure for 13 seconds at f4 and ISO 1000. The entire process took about 10 minutes and resulted in a cohesive, true to life final image.

What Makes the Image Look this Way? I think many photographers would be surprised to know that there is very little Photoshop here. Most of the look of the image comes from the conditions rather than enhanced effects. Three aspects of the conditions were really important. First, the half moon just to the lower right portion of the sky caused the fractures in the ice to capture and reflect a shimmering light. Since the clear portions of the ice did not reflect light, they turned a dark blueish hue similar to the night sky. In Photoshop, I enhanced this effect slightly by increasing the contrast in the ice and lifting the highlights. This is normal and would have happened naturally had the image been made with film.

The location and timing of the sunrise was also very important to the final appearance of the image. The photograph of the sky was made about 1 hour before sunrise at around 7:45 am. To the naked eye, the orange glow in the saddle of the mountains was barely visible. But when using ISO 1000, light areas of an image register relatively more brightly on the image sensor than surrounding dark areas. This caused the wonderful glow of pre-dawn light on the horizon.

Finally, the low sun rising underneath the clouds in the center of the sky had the effect of lighting the cloud and making it stand out in the sky.

Although the conditions were critical, there is some Photoshop work here. But really, the only major adjustment I made was to the hue and saturation of the sky. I lowered the saturation of the sky and made it less cyan thereby creating a more cohesive sky, foreground relationship. Other than stitching together the focus stacked images, that's it! I hope you enjoy the image and feel free to email me about it if you would like to know more.

‹ ‹ Previous Posts

Some Related Links...

All images copyright of Maru Landscapes - 2010. Landscape Photography of the Pacific Northwest.